Citizen Summit Day 2

Other breakout sessions over the weekend included green jobs, disaster preparedness, sustainable cities transportation, SCP, food security; local, state, provincial & regional action; interfaith and nonpartisan action, conservation, energy efficiency, fisheries, education; new indicators, measurement and verification, and "un-conference" proposals from participants. The overall emphasis was on developing citizen advocacy for Rio+20.

Kari Fulton, EJCC. Paul St Pierre-Plamondon, Génération d'Idées

I attended a breakout on climate justice by Kari Fulton of EJCC. Because of the long struggle of an Afro Americans and other minorities against environmental dumping in their neighborhoods, they have much experience to offer. She also urged international solidarity with grassroots Local Justice, Via Campesina, and Climate Justice Now. There is a historic misuse of power by the rich countries, allied with local elites in the poor countries–a situation protested by a Vandana Shiva in Earth Democracy. Evo Morales, the 1st indigenous president of Bolivia, held a world conference of the poor at Cochabamba in 2010. In the US there was almost no press coverage. Wiki leaks showed that the United States blackmailed governments to join the Copenhagen Accord; those that did not, had their aid cut. As a program of action she proposed the 10 principles for just climate policies in the US.

Plenaries in the 2nd day: coalition building for Rio+20 explored reasons for coalition, expanding beyond the local, pulling together resources and ideas, UN prepcoms, reaching new groups. There will be monthly conference calls you. A guide to house parties and other organizing methods is available.

In the afternoon, we heard from David Malone of the American Sustainable Business Council, who called for a combination of citizen and corporate greening, including environmental justice and indigenous stakeholders. Voluntary commitments are extremely important but systemic changes are also needed. How can we connect the indicators? How can we act within the required time? He was followed by Law Prof. John Dernbach of Widener University who said that what he was witnessing here was the merchants of sustainable development movement. I've been teaching this since 1992 and see increasing connections between different experts, you are now moving into citizen action. His new book is titled Acting as if Tomorrow Matters.

A number of other speakers offered visions and comments on the UN process. They are better seen in the live videos (links are to be posted on the Summit site) particularly those of Mexico's rep to the UNCSD, Jorge Laguna-Celis.

For updates and new contributions see:
Yale SFES Sage Magazine's blog from the summit
rio20-social-media@googlegroups.com
rio20.net
mobilize-us.org
citnet.org
earthsummit.ca
sustainus.org

At the US-Canada Citizen Summit, Yale University

  The U.S./Canada Citizens’ Summit for Sustainable Development held at Yale University School of Forestry  Environmental Studies March 24-25, 2012 was organized by Yale students, faculty and staff, with the Citizens Network for Sustainable Development, We Canada, the Natural Resources Defense Council, SustainUS, and the Human Impact Institute. It aims to foster coherent, effective citizen advocacy for the UN Rio +20  conference.

The first day opened with a panel discussion “20 years after Rio–why are we not there yet?”
Dan Esty of Connecticut Department of Energy (former deputy head Rio 1992 US delegation) said the present lack of political will was due to 1. the absence of a firm scientific basis, clearly acknowledging uncertainty and trade-offs; 2. absence of policy choices that appeal to  business e.g. Stephen Schmidthemy's energy efficiency; 3. politics of moral righteousness which are insufficient to gain wide support.

Jacob Scheer of NDRC lauded Rio 1992 for laying the foundations of Agenda 21, two treaties and forest commitments. 150 countries set up policy institutions, 86 established plans, thousands of cities joined in, corporations accepted the idea of a “triple bottom line”. 1992 was a climax of 1950s activism, with top-down, one-size-fits-all planning. This faded due to lack of leadership on emissions cuts and direct aid to poor countries. The public was not engaged we can learn from the last 20 years. There are no 1.2 billion more humans, 40 500 million emerging from poverty, coal use has doubled and climate change is now an immediate crisis–not one for the grandchildren. Other changes: we are crossing planetary boundaries, globalization has eroded state power e.g. Walmart has more income than 100 countries, Gates foundation is bigger than WHO; digital revolution has given us 6 billion cell users, 2 million on Internet, engaging people directly. Hopes to mobilize public opinion and generate commitments from the bottom up.

Yale Forestry & Env. Studies Kroon Hall

For J.L."Kimo" Goree of IISD's Environmental Negotiations Bulletin, Rio 2012 is no 1992.  The enabling resolution would not be possible today. The 1992 deal was never fulfilled -- no technological transfer and no direct aid to poor countries; doomed by globalization (1994 WTO, emphasis on trade not aid) and the loss of the peace dividend; never-ending negotiations. See his new book The Road from Rio. The correct Zero Draft is a dog's breakfast, lacking ambition and vision, showing loss of enthusiasm for international agreements, and infighting between UN agencies. Unlike 1992, UN DESA is currently underfunded, understaffed and unable to do the necessary preparations. In 1992 there were 400 pages. In 2012 there are only 2 themes: the green economy and sustainable development. No binding commitments. Where is the “should”? Where are best practices? Where are the means of getting there? For instance at the recent Rio+2.0 conference at Stanford http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/rio20-conference, entrepreneurs, corporations and practitioners enthusiastically discussed how IT could help.
Esty: the US rejected the idea of reining in consumption and finance; Agenda 21 was part of the problem, lost focus with too many priorities, social priorities swamped sustainable development.
Scheer: civil society can provide the lost vision, focus on action plans and accountability. If each country and each corporation said here's what I'm doing, here's where I need help. We have to escape from the situation where everybody is promising and no one is responsible. We hope for a social media wave starting on Earth Day 2012.
Goree: IEAWG commitments were made in 2009. I support a call for commitments so we can monitor compliance. There were at Rio 1992 specific promises to reaffirm  0.7% GNP for direct aid  -- rich countries failed. Weasel words. The US omitted itself in this text because it had never "affirmed" this level of aid.
Esty: Degrowth and reducing consumption will fail in the USA. Those values are too alien. We need to harness the market, create incentive structures.

Gail Karlsson and Michael Dorsey

I attended the morning session on energy, and the afternoon breakout session on interfaith activity (one of many). A huge range of actions and hopes, difficult to summarize. Lots of useful contacts.

Afternoon plenaries:
The UNGA High-level Panel on Global Sustainability was discussed by Prof. Ben Cashore of Yale, Georgios Kostakos of the GS panel, and Jim Balsillie of RIM/BlackBerry, who called it a new paradigm for growth, choice and resilience. He challenged us to use social media to construct visions, and to avoid righteousness and top-down solutions

John Matuszak of the US State Department said it will not treat Rio +20 as an environmental negotiation but operate under presidential order 1000 (??) ; it will challenge civil society to create voluntary commitments, partnerships with business, and find an integrating principle. The Zero Draft is a voluntary document, trying to be all things to all people. Everybody is committed to everything, but there is no responsibility for anyone. Civil society can use social media to hold parties to their commitments. Rio can reset the UN process to focus on development as well as the environment, involving all parts of society [especially business]. The US wants to scale back the Zero Draft, cutting it down to a short document that identifies a few goals. Could be accompanied by an Internet "compendium of commitments" with civil society acting as watchdogs, and web-based geospatial data.

Prof Ben Cathore noted the launching of GEM: Government, Environment and Markets initiative at Yale.

Dianne Dillon-Ridgley

Dianne Dillon-Ridgley closed the session by thanking her ancestors and her grandchildren, and quoting Maya Angelou: One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, fruitful, generous, or honest.

When the Water Ends: tribal conflicts in Kenya

This story is reprinted from Yale Environment 360, an online publication of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. See also the UNCHR debate on incitements to hatred in Africa.

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For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.

These herdsmen have long been accustomed to adapting to a changing environment. But in recent years, they have faced challenges unlike any in living memory: As temperatures in the region have risen and water supplies have dwindled, the pastoralists have had to range more widely in search of suitable water and land. That search has brought tribal groups in Ethiopia and Kenya in increasing conflict, as pastoral communities kill each other over water and grass.

“When the Water Ends,” a 16-minute video produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. To report this video, Evan Abramson, a 32-year-old photographer (see his slideshow and intervew) and videographer, spent two months in the region early this year, living among the herding communities. He returned with a tale that many climate scientists say will be increasingly common in the 21st century and beyond — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.”

But the story recounted in “When the Water Ends” is not only about climate change. It’s also about how deforestation and land degradation — due in large part to population pressures — are exacting a toll on impoverished farmers and nomads as the earth grows ever more barren.

The video focuses on four groups of pastoralists — the Turkana of Kenya and the Dassanech, Nyangatom, and Mursi of Ethiopia — who are among the more than two dozen tribes whose lives and culture depend on the waters of the Omo River and the body of water into which it flows, Lake Turkana. For the past 40 years at least, Lake Turkana has steadily shrunk because of increased evaporation from higher temperatures and a steady reduction in the flow of the Omo due to less rainfall, increased diversion of water for irrigation, and upstream dam projects. As the lake has diminished, it has disappeared altogether from Ethiopian territory and retreated south into Kenya. The Dassanech people have followed the water, and in doing so have come into direct conflict with the Turkana of Kenya.

The result has been cross-border raids in which members of both groups kill each other, raid livestock, and torch huts. Many people in both tribes have been left without their traditional livelihoods and survive thanks to food aid from nonprofit organizations and the UN.

The future for the tribes of the Omo-Turkana basin looks bleak. Temperatures in the region have risen by about 2 degrees F since 1960. Droughts are occurring with a frequency and intensity not seen in recent memory. Areas once prone to drought every ten or eleven years are now experiencing a drought every two or three. Scientists say temperatures could well rise an additional 2 to 5 degrees F by 2060, which will almost certainly lead to even drier conditions in large parts of East Africa.

In addition, the Ethiopian government is building a dam on the upper Omo River — the largest hydropower project in sub-Saharan Africa — that will hold back water and prevent the river’s annual flood cycles, upon which more than 500,000 tribesmen in Ethiopia and 300,000 in Kenya depend for cultivation, grazing, and fishing.

The herdsmen who speak in this video are caught up in forces over which they have no real control. Although they have done almost nothing to generate the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, they may already be among its first casualties. “I am really beaten by hunger,” says one elderly, rail-thin Nyangatom tribesman. “There is famine — people are dying here. This happened since the Turkana and the Kenyans started fighting with us. We fight over grazing lands. There is no peace at all.”